Edward Kienholz

Edward Kienholz - From the confines of his parents' home into the vastness of the avant-garde

Edward Kienholz was born on 23rd October 1927 in Fairfield, Washington. He spent his childhood in a rural environment on a wheat farm in the arid east of the country and suffered under the strictness of his father and the religious fervour of his mother. Kienholz acquired manual skills such as carpentry and repairing machines on his family’s farm, and he also developed a penchant for drawing. In order to escape the confines of his parents' home, Kienholz decided to study art, which he ended prematurely without a formal degree. In his search for direction and meaning, Kienholz kept his head above water with a whole series of odd jobs, working as a psychiatric nurse, caterer, manager of a dance band, used car salesman, decorator and hoover salesman. After some turmoil, he sought and found a connection to the avant-garde art scene in Los Angeles, and in 1956, opened his NOW Gallery, for which Michael Bowen had designed the company sign.

Spatial installations made from junk, found objects and scrap 

After dropping out of university, Edward Kienholz remained a self-taught artist for the rest of his life, but nevertheless became an important protagonist of the modern art scene. Together with Walter Hopps and his wife Shirley Neilsen Blum, he opened the Ferus Gallery in 1957, which became a centre of avant-garde art and culture in Los Angeles for almost a decade. In his artistic work, he benefited from the carpentry skills he had acquired on his parents' farm: initially, he mainly created reliefs from wood, but soon moved on to three-dimensional works, for which he specifically sought out suitable material at the city's flea markets. At the beginning of the 1960s, he began designing expansive installations, combining these ‘environments’ with paint and colour to form a single unit. His first project of this kind was called Roxy's and was a replica of a brothel in Nevada that he had visited as a teenager - including a jukebox from the 1930s, antique furniture, and brothel visitors assembled from pieces of scrap metal. Kienholz also presented this work at Documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968, causing quite a stir.

Long-standing collaboration with his wife Nancy Reddin

Edward Kienholz repeatedly addressed difficult and uncomfortable topics in his installations: Rape, birth control, discrimination, bigotry and the waste of resources became the subject of his projects. His Portable War Memorial, for which he critically scrutinised American national icons such as Uncle Sam, caused a sensation in 1968. For all his deliberate provocation, Kienholz was also a master of image cultivation and self-staging. After four failed marriages, he met the photographer and object artist Nancy Reddin, with whom he spent the rest of his life and worked closely together. In 1981, Kienholz himself officially declared that his fifth wife was the equal co-author of all his works created since 1972 - an extraordinary decision for the time. Edward Kienholz received prizes and honours for his art, including the Arnold Bode Prize of the documenta - City of Kassel in 1988.

Edward Kienholz died on 10th June 1994 in Hope, Idaho. At his own request, he was buried in his car - together with the urn containing the ashes of his dog, a bottle of red wine and a dollar